Tag Archives: expat

Having lived as an expat for nearly five years now, during which time I have seen many fellow expats come and go (it’s a transient sort of place), I have noticed that, while many take back to British life like ducks to proverbial muddy water, others find it a little bit more tricky to adjust… …

We’re all guilty of it: never visiting that National Trust property that’s only half an hour away; never getting around to trying that lovely looking restaurant passed every day on the way home from work; never walking the promising public footpath that cuts back across the fields just before the motorway turn-off; never exploring the …

‘Tree-hugger’ is a vaguely insulting term for those perceived as hippy environmentalists, used fairly indiscriminately to describe pretty much anyone from an animal rights activist to a bypass protester. It’s also an epithet that has come to be associated with Prince Charles following his mid-1980s confessions about talking to his trees and plants to encourage …

This is, apparently, one of the most depressing times of the year for British folk. The sparkling fairy lights of Christmas are long gone, but the winter drags on – bitingly cold and remorselessly damp. The mornings are dark and, throughout the grey days, the evenings loiter just beyond the horizon, bringing back the night-time …

It has been a lovely winter over here in Dubai. Usually the winter is only distinguishable from the rest of the year by a slight drop in temperature: in all other ways the weather remains the same – blazing blue skies and relentless sunshine. This year, however, it has rained A LOT. We’ve had proper, …

Where do you go on holiday when you already live in the middle of a sun-sea-and-sand holiday destination? The answer is, somewhere just a little bit different… Like Norfolk. In November. As bleak as that may sound to some of you, this holiday had plenty of sun, sea and sand, just not the holiday brochure …

I am about to head home again for a week of British autumn and, as I pack my suitcase full of thermal undies and attempt to zip it closed (having first removed the dozing cat from within), I am reminded of the last time I packed my bags for a flight – back home in …

We have moved ten miles up the road and it feels as if we’ve moved to a different country entirely. Al Barsha, our haunt for the last three years, has many good points: it is fairly central, close to the Metro and a big mall, and it is the home of Shawarmaji – purveyors of …

I had never driven an automatic before, or driven on the right, or driven on the crazy roads of Dubai. But we were moving house and buying furniture and transporting fish tanks and cats, and the whole thing would have been a nightmare without a car, so I grasped the proverbial nettle… The advice I …

A Homesick and Heatstruck Book Review Sunday Times writer, Matt Rudd, has quite selflessly spent the last couple of years loitering around grubby motorway service stations, dodgy B&Bs and East Anglian dogging hotspots in order to write this splendid book (at least that was his excuse…). Just like Homesick and Heatstruck and many of my lovely …

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Homesick and Heatstruck isn’t just the bewildered wittering of a British woman who inexplicably finds herself living in the Middle East (although it is that too), it’s also a ponderous blog about the nature of 'home' and being somewhere other. This is a pseudo-philosophical journal of my quest to thwart my sadness and silliness and embrace my new home... I hope you enjoy it. Please do leave a comment - and come back again soon.

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